Getting Started Guide

Here's a brief list of the first things you should to when you join A Greener Indiana. Doing these few things will help you get going in the community.1. Complete your profile information (answer the questions, fill in the blanks)
2. Upload you profile photo
-Company logos are fine, but if you put a company logo then you should talk about how your company is working on being greener.
- a picture or icon helps people remember you as an individual3. Find and join groups of interest (click "groups" at top of page)
- The backbone of A Greener Indiana is the groups. It is easy to communicate to all of the members of a group and members of a group get notified of new content. Most of the groups feature live feeds from one or more sites, so the content will be fresh...check back often.4. Add comments to interesting discussions - there are many ways to communicate on this site. Check out this entire discussion on this topic.5. Invite people you know or want to know to be your friend. When these people join they will be automatically added to your friends list. You can easily blast out an e-mail to all of the people that are your freind. Click on the Invite button in your toolbar to get started.

If you have any questions then ask them and from there this "how-to" will evolve.

There are a lot of ways to communicate on A Greener Indiana. This can be confusing to people that are new to the website and maybe new to posting info online. I wanted to take a second to go through all of the ways to communicate to help people get started.

Groups - best way to converse with the community on a detailed and topical level - the groups are the backbone of the site. This is where I hope that we can work together to all learn how to be greener. This is where people interested in particular topics can gather to discuss them. Joining a group will allow you to easily find people with like interests. Using groups allows for the info on the site to be better organized and it allows members of the group to easily communicate.

Forums - best way to converse with the whole community. - forums are great places to have discussions that dont fit well within groups. The groups have forums of their own so post there if your discussion applies to the topic of the group.

Blogs - best way to talk about what you think. - Blog is shorthand for web log. These are a great place to talk about yourself and your feelings about how to make Indiana Greener. A blog is a great place for articles or stories. The forums are better suited for discusssions.

Messaging - best for a conversation with another site member or to alert a group of people about a new happening. - you can only message your friends on A Greener Indiana. This is much like e-mail, but more of a private e-mail system used just for this site. You will notice your envelope in the upper part of your window and this is where you access your messaging area. You can group message your friends or you can group message all of the members of a group you are a member of .

Comment wall on your member page - best used for comments and not discussions - You will notice that if you reply to a comment that somebody left for you then you will be commenting on that member's comment wall. So effectively half of the discussion will be on your comment wall and the other half will be on theirs. This makes it hard for people to follow a conversation and makes for bad site content that is not fun to look at.

Chat (experimental)- this feature is on the bottom of the front page and it is testing right now. Chats work best if they are scheduled in advance.

In short order everybody will figure out which method of communication works best to accomplish their goals.

What is an RSS Feed and why is it important to you?

RSS stands or Really Simple Syndication and that is the standard way to feed content from one website to another. It is important to you because you can post something once and then have that info automatically post elsewhere.

This site lets you add an RSS feed to any group, or your profile, or just about anywhere.

This site also creates an RSS feed out of just about any part of your profile, so you can post here and have that automatically show up on another site!

We are currently doing an outreach to anybody who would like to lean how more about RSS Feeds. Please post below and we will contact you.

Comment Wall

You need to be a member of Get help using AGreenerIndiana.com to add comments!

I do not believe there will be any implications for www.AGreenerIndiana.com. It has been a premium paid site since the beginning. We pay to supress the google ads and also pay to redirect the domain name.

If anything I think it will help speed up the site because they will have more server resources without the free sites hogging them up.

I believe they should charge something like 12 bucks a year for what is free now....then at least the resources would be used by somebody who cared at least a little bit.

Ning sites are getting attacked by spammers who are using computer programs to add members and then post. I bet there are a lot of headaches for NING and I bet the problems gobble up manpower.

Eric: As Earth day nears, news of NING Networks requiring premium service are all over twitter. What are the implications of the news below to www.agreenerindiana.com

This week a month after Gina Bianchini, co-founder of social networking service Ning, left the company Jason Rosenthal the Ning COO announced that it’s to lose 40 percent of its staff and ceasing its free, ad-supported service.

CNET reported that Ning had raised US$119 million in venture capital, including a US$60 million round in early 2008.

Rosenthal sent an e-mail memo to employees on Thursday (that apparently according to CNET, was forwarded to industry blog TechCrunch) in which he commented that Ning will in the future be focusing on premium (paid) networks.

Members (11)

Feed from Indiana Living Green Magazine

I have been forever collecting the plastic mesh bags that hold produce — mostly apples, limes, lemons, etc. I keep thinking my kids could make the best fishing nets out of them if needed. This is probably just a bad side effect from watching too much Doomsday Preppers